GUID / UUID support in MaxDB?

Hello,

We are migrating from Microsoft SQLServer to MaxDB. One of the issues we encountered is support of Globally Unique IDentifiers, which are very common in SQLServer database.

1. How can we generate a new GUID in MaxDB's SQL and stored procedures, without passing it in from an external language (Java)? Is there an equivalent for SQLServer's NEWID() function?

2. What is the recommended data type for storing GUIDs? We currently use CHAR(36), but that is more than 2 times larger than the original 16 bytes.

Thanks,

Rares